roger_that

It used to make some sense to wonder if the team that won 94 games was better or worse than the team that won 103 games because they'd played different opponents during the regular season, so who knew really which had faced stronger opposition. The World Series settled all that. Or so we pretended to think, absent further information. Now not so much. You don't have to look very far this year to find a team that dominated all of baseball for the first 85 games of the season, and fell apart to mediocrity for the final 85 games, playoffs included. Were the Yankees a great team in the playoffs, or a mediocre team? Were the Mets strong, based on the whole regular season, or weak, based on their final month? "That's why they play the games" but now I wonder. You could solve all the weather issues by taking the names of every team that won more than half its games, and picking one name out of a hat to settle the question of who is that year's World's Champs. Save a lot of time that way.

Do teams have to take the players' and agents' word for the other offers they've received, or can they see the other teams' offers in writing? How does it work if Cohen says, "I'll match any team's offer, Jake"? Seems like a very difficult question to get a straight definitive answer on.

Instead of the dupe post: I put Timo's brainfart on the bases on Bobby V. Seems to me, someone has to take the hit when a fundy is ignored, and not just the player who passed gas.

We got beat in that Series but it's funny. I still think we were the better team and would have won it if it were the best of nine, or eleven or thirteen.... we just ran out of games.

Benjamin Grimm wrote: That notion (a ghost win) was proposed during the CBA talks earlier this year. I seem to recall that it was the players who rejected it, but someone here (Gwreck maybe?) recalls that the players suggested it and the owners rejected it. One of us is wrong, but I haven't checked to verify which side proposed and which rejected. Well, whoever rejected it, would you trade it for a BYE?

Very interesting idea. I like it.

The best part was Clemens explaining "I thought it [the bat shard] was the ball." Uh, OK, so why would you throw the "ball" at the batter? And wait, you thought a sharp piece of wood was a round cloth-covered object with which you are intimately familiar? Anyone who would buy anything out of this habitual liar's mouth after that is stupider than he is.

=Ceetar post_id=111757 time=1666452116 user_id=102] Zero teams granted a bye have ever failed to advance out of the first round, and a non-zero teams that HAVEN'T ( think 2022 Mets) been granted a first round bye have failed to advance. Seems pretty conclusive to me. The percentages for non-bye teams to win that next series would have to be so lopsided that even republicans believed it for it to outweigh that.

Right. Tiny sample size. So you have to use other parts of your brain

22 years ago todayhttps://twitter.com/i/status/1583785767423598594

not sure how sarcastic you're being, mm, in citing Melvin "of course" believing that playing an extra series helped his team win the next round. That's super-positive managerial spin ("I think breaking a leg ultimately helped my player develop running skills he wouldn't have developed otherwise, and I wish more players would break their legs....") but I don't think it's much evidence for anything. It's one thing to look backwards to a series you've won and cite all the (idiotic) reasons you think you won it, but try asking a manager of a losing series if getting to the next series via a BYE would have been preferable. Buck Showalter, for example. "Hey, Buck, did playing SD help or hurt your team this post-season?" Even if the rustiness (speculated on but far from proven) hurt you more than the rest and recovery helped (a very dubious argument in itself), the BYE's assurance of getting to the next round blows the argument away. If rust is 60% and rest is 40%, it's still a no-brainer to take the BYE. And I'm submitting it's a no-brainer to peg rust at 10% and rest at 90%. Another thought experiment: Let's say the Mets use Edwin Diaz in a normal one-inning save for Saturday's game but get blown out on Sunday, so he sits. Then Monday's a travel day, and Tuesday they blow out their opponent so he sits again. Wednesday night, they have a one run lead in the ninth, so he comes in to save the game. How worried are you that Diaz has had three straight days of inactivity? Not at all. You're thinking "Perfect. Diaz has had three days to rest, he's not tired or overworked at all. I'm expecting three straight outs here" , right? Now contrast that with the opposite situation: Diaz has pitched in all three games, with Monday off, and you bring him in for the fourth straight game. This is a scary situation, I think. At some point, and I think the fourth straight game is that point, you're reasonably apprehensive that you're working Diaz too hard, that you just can't keep pitching him that much and not expect his pitching to suffer. It may even be that Buck keeps him out of the game that fourth straight game and uses someone else as the closer that night, and no one blames him even if that someone else gets lit up. What we're talking about is the same situation x 25. You're relying on a very small sample size of games to make your point. I'm not saying you're a braying jackass, btw. You're citing anonymous braying jackasses in making your case, but you're not being one. You're just defending a weak case.

Do teams have to take the players' and agents' word for the other offers they've received, or can they see the other teams' offers in writing? How does it work if Cohen says, "I'll match any team's offer, Jake"?

I'd like some cheese with that whine, please.

But are they actually good for those teams, aside from increasing their odds of getting only exactly that far? Does taking the week off make that team better able to play at a high level, or can it be a posssible detriment? Yes, they're good for those teams. No, the disadvantages of BYEs (while they exist) are overwhelmingly outweighed by the advantages, even casting aside the value of advancing into the next round uncontested. It's so clear that BYEs favor the team that gets them that I'm more than slightly puzzled why you want to have this discussion. The teams that get them not only wouldn't trade places with the teams that don't, but they wouldn't even talk or think about turning one down for 3/4th of a second. Now, it might be worth a theoretical discussion if we were talking about a week off, or ten days off, but we're not. We're talking about three or four days off, with planned, scheduled workout times, extra physical therapies, etc. If we were talking about two weeks off, I'd concede that at some point, your argument would have some merit--but even then, so would mine. There comes a period of time off that your side wins the argument, but we're not nearly there with a three-day or four-day layoff. Let me give you one example: say a starting pitcher has to suffer a minor injury, a mild sprained ankle that makes him miss a start, and maybe two. Conservatively you put him on a 15-day IL, and have him do some throwing on Day 10, and it turns out that he's fine. So when he comes back on Day 16, rested, uninjured, having thrown 50 or 60 pitches on Day 10, are you thinking "He's going to be a mess. We'd better score 12 or 15 runs today, because he's been resting his arm for two weeks so he's going to get lit up like the 4th of July"? No, at worst you're expecting him to be his usual self, and you're probably rooting realistically for him to benefit from the rest and relaxation. I certainly am not expecting a disastrous outing. This topic is only slightly less dumb than, oh, "Is it better for a pitcher to be ahead in the count or behind?" and backing up your side by arguing that often HRs are hit when the pitcher has an 0-2 advantage. Yes, there are occasions that being ahead doesn't work out, but that's still the way the smart money is bet, and suggesting otherwise, or even that it is an open question, doesn't get you a discussion but rather a puzzled look and the question "Are you OK?" . .

Look at it this way: You sign him and he goes to Mediocresville, so what do you do? You make him into a DH and worst case scenario, he's a lot better at DH than what you had in 2022.

"a fuck-ton of handwringing" is a good phrase. I'd add "from ignorant jackasses whose next real thought will be their first one." All you have to do see the value of BYEs, as I've said before, is to give teams the choice: you can rest for four or five days, or you can play for your lives and, if you lose, go home. Which choice will teams take 100% of the time? So why are we even discussing "BYEs: Good or Bad?" any more? Because of ignorant jackasses? Let 'em bray. Serieseses.

the short serieses are what really fucks things up. but long serieses AND top-seed byes fuck things up even more. ...or at least as much. Wrong wrong wrongedy wrong! We need MORE short series for the 83- and 86-win teams. Not even a series. The two (or four) lowest seeded teams play one game to see who gets into the next round. Unfair? You dont like it? Tough--win more games in the regular season. The winners of the one game WC gets to play three games at the next-seeded teams' park, and the winner there gets to play (on the road) a team that's had a BYE for the past few days. 1, 3, 5, 7 games, all on the road for the lowest seeded team. The plural of "series" btw is "series." Like "deer" and "deer."

Frayed Knot wrote: I don't see the attraction in including those teams that were shown over the long haul of a complete season to be a cut beneath the top teams and even less in including those several cuts below them. Problem here, as I see it, is that the 1973 Mets would have been laughed out of the playoffs, instead of going on to beat the Reds, and very nearly the A's. Were they a cut below the Reds, Dodgers, and Giants who all won many more games than the Mets that year in the NL West?

The whole thing about the playoffs, to my mind, is admitting mediocre teams (i.e., teams other than the one that won the most regular season games) to the party but disadvantaging them so severely that they earn their right to advance by beating teams they shouldn't be beating. So what disadvantages are there to dish out? Home field, obviously, is one--not a huge disadvantage, but a reliable one. Short series--even facing a one-game "series" should be the first round for the weakest Wild Card teams, on the principle of "Yuz shouldn't even be here in the first place, you sucked in the regular season, so deal with it." I would pile a day/night doubleheader or two on the next round of playoffs, in the interest of saving time AND making it tougher for the teams that squeak into the playoffs. It also has the effect of tiring out the winner of such series, messing up their pitching, both starters and relievers, and depriving their regulars of a breather that the team they're facing in the next round gets. You pile on the disadvantages, and the team that overcomes them, if they're severe enough, will have earned their spot in the later playoff series. Are there any powerful disadvantages I'm forgetting about?

Are we overthinking this a little bit? Seems to me that any playoff system will have an inferior (85-win) team beating its superiors a decent chunk of the time, and superior (100+) win teams will get clobbered in the first round once in a while. That's why they play the games, etc. Further, some years this will occur grossly, with multiple superior teams getting beaten by inferior teams. If you don't want this to happen, stop watching the playoffs. That danger is inherent to the concept of playoffs. And actually I have stopped watching. Once the Mets are out of it, my interest in MLB goes down to the levels of interest in watching paint dry. Maybe that's why I reacted so strongly and so bitterly to the Mets getting clobbered. I wanted a few more weeks of baseball, and I felt entitled to it. Which is wrong, I know. But that entitlement is running rampant here. You watch the playoffs on the offchance that a so-so team will emerge as the Champions of the World. That's the whole ballgame, giving mediocrities a chance to show that the regular season didn't mean squat.

Yeah, there are some other things wrong with it as well. A 50-win team with a $20M budget would have a better W/$ ratio than a 100-win team with a $50M budget. But it is irritating that it's so hard to measure the quantity of a GM's achievements. A manager, too, for that matter. Maybe I've just fallen in love with such things as WAR that attempt to (and do a pretty fair job of) measuring players objectively.

Has anyone tried doing this? In some (simplistic) sense, it's easy: figure out the dates of each GM's tenure, tote up the wins his teams got during the time he was listed as GM, divide by the $ of all the contracts signed during his time, and come up with a number. I'm sure there are more sophisticated ways to arrive at a GM SUCCESS RATIO that take innumerable factors into account, but what's wrong with this as your basic starting point?

How about ratcheting up the standards for Wild Card teams to beat Division Leaders? Make the WC teams play a longer series, say, on the road for the lesser of the teams, in a shorter period of time, like a five game series in three days, depleting their pitching horribly, and then scheduling a next day game at the next round's home stadium? My point is, if an 88 win team can win three out of five in three days and then face a 100 win team on the road, and win there, haven't they earned a little respect?

My other idea is for the World Series winners to get World Series rings and extra bonus money and a big hometown parade in their honor or instead, they could take a bullet to the back of their heads. I wonder how many would choose the second option? Of course, it would be their choice. Frayed Knot wrote: =roger_that post_id=111333 time=1665864747 user_id=128] I had the idea a while back of making things like a BYE an option for the teams getting one--that is, instead of the Dodgers and Yankees earning three games off, they earn the option of playing those games (and risking elimination, of course) OR getting to take the short series off. Do you really suppose any team that earned that option would take it? I can't imagine that, which tells you something I think about the value of the BYE. It's valuable, even if this year so far it appears not to be. OF COURSE earning the Bye is valuable. The Braves & Dodgers & Astros & Yanx had ZERO chance of losing in that opening 2/3 round ... unlike, say, the Mets. Any team who earned that right would be moronic if they chose not to use it. It's here in the Next (current) round where the rest and the HF advantage and the rotation set-up that are by-products of having the Bye doesn't seem to be doing those teams much good even though, once again, they are by definition the superior team.

Frayed Knot wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: Problem is that HF advantage matters little in baseball and the whole 'rested pitching staff' edge isn't exactly working out as planned. If you're right--and I don't believe you are--then we must question some longstanding principles of baseball ... Or you could accept the much more likely possibility that THIS YEAR, in a small sample size, HF field advantage isn't yielding its usual result so far. Well, HF advantage in baseball IS measurably smaller than in any of the other sports we typically consume typically hovering around 53-54%, roughly the equivalent of home teams going 8-7 over a 15-game span vs 7-8 for the roadies. Not a non-existent edge, but not a big one either. And the extended rest thing (5 games pretty much qualifies as extended in baseball) is new for this season so, yes, it is so far an ongoing sample size of one. As I type, home teams are 10-9 this post-season and the rested vs non-rested teams are deadlocked at 5-5 Also, do keep in mind that the rested teams and the ones with the majority of the home games are, by definition over a six month span, the better team, sometimes by more than 20 games in the standings, and are still basically breaking even. And, again, my point is that if leagues and fans are going to stick with the 'more is better' theory of post-season tourneys then they also need to accept that the marquee events -- the LCSx2 and the WS -- stand a decent chance of not having some or even all of the top teams involved. Some, I'm sure, are going to be OK with that, others I don't believe think it through. I think I can already hear a network executive saying; 'Whattaya mean we're not getting a Dodgers/Yankees matchup'!! I had the idea a while back of making things like a BYE an option for the teams getting one--that is, instead of the Dodgers and Yankees earning three games off, they earn the option of playing those games (and risking elimination, of course) OR getting to take the short series off. Do you really suppose any team that earned that option would take it? I can't imagine that, which tells you something I think about the value of the BYE. It's valuable, even if this year so far it appears not to be.